Tag Archives: public participation

This is the second of a two-part blog on high streets and town centres. In our last post, we highlighted some recent publications that have sought to address the challenges facing our high streets and town centres.

We looked at how towns could work to diversify their retail offer, placing greater focus upon developing experiences and services that are not easily replicated online – such as hair and beauty services, gyms, cinema, restaurants and nightlife.

We also highlighted the benefits of identifying a town centre’s unique selling point (USP), capitalising on the opportunities presented by the widespread growth of technology, and offering various forms of support to local businesses and entrepreneurs.

In this post, we consider how community involvement, good quality inclusive urban design, the promotion of healthy environments and the creation of homes on the high street can all provide ways to promote and support town centres to better meet the needs of local people in a changing retail and economic environment.

A community-focused high street

The town centre has long been considered the beating heart of a community. As such, it makes sense that any attempt to revitalise them would have local people at its heart.

In Dunfermline, a pilot placemaking project has made use of innovative, interactive methods of engagement with young people to help plan and deliver town centre improvements.

Young people were asked to assess the quality of the town centre and to identify areas where improvements could be made, using tools such as the Place Standard and the Town Centre Toolkit.

Stalled Spaces Scotland is another noteworthy project – with a focus on greening derelict, under- or unused outdoor areas. As well as improving the look and feel of a town centre, this scheme also aims to involve the local community and schools in the development and use of the spaces themselves.

A healthy and accessible high street

It goes without saying that if town centres are to attract both people and businesses then they must be both attractive and accessible – easily walkable, safe, and clean. Indeed, amongst its findings, the High Street 2030 report highlights “calls for improved accessibility that is more environmentally-friendly, new public spaces or areas, centres that better serve older people”.

There has also been considerable discussion around how the design of town centres (and urban areas in general) impact upon various vulnerable groups. We have blogged on this subject on various occasions, focusing in turn on the creation of places that address the needs of older people, people with dementia, autistic people and children.

There has also been widespread discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of shared space street design – which has been used by many places in the UK in attempt to revitalise their town centre spaces with varying levels of success.

As well as their role in the creation of inclusive, accessible spaces for all, there has been some focus upon the link between high streets and health.

Last year, Public Health England published guidance on the development of ‘healthy high streets’ – high streets that have a positive influence on the health of local people. It focuses on elements such as air quality, enhanced walkability, the provision of good quality street design, street furniture, and communal spaces. It argues that the development of healthy high streets will support economic growth as well as community cohesion.

It also approaches the subject of diversity on the high street – recommending that there is an adequate number of healthy and affordable food outlets and limiting the number of alcohol, betting and payday loan outlets.

A high street to call home

Another way of bringing people back into the high street is to have them literally live there.

At the end of 2017, the Federation of Master Builders published a report ‘Homes on our high streets’, which argued that “revitalising our high streets through well planned and designed residential units could help rejuvenate smaller town centres”.

For example, Aldershot, as highlighted in the High Streets 2030 report, has been making use of the Housing Infrastructure Fund to promote residential development in the town centre and has undertaken property acquisition in the town centre, most recently acquiring the former Marks & Spencer store.

Creating additional homes above shops or in former retail units not only helps to make use of vacant properties and regenerate town centres, but may also help to address housing shortages in many areas.

Looking to the Future

So while 2019 may present high streets and town centres with some of their toughest challenges yet, there is a wealth of research, experiences and innovative ideas on which to draw. The newly announced Future High Streets Fund will no doubt be of use to help put these ideas into practice.

And perhaps most importantly of all, local people remain enthusiastic about developing their town centres and wish to see them flourish. As the High Streets 2030 project noted:

“The workshops and interactions provided real insight into the challenges faced by town centres. That they are worth fighting for was abundantly evident from the enthusiasm of those participating.”

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Local authority planning departments are more often associated with bureaucracy than with delivering good quality customer service.

However, as the current reform of the planning system in Scotland puts the need to develop a modern, efficient service in the spotlight, thoughts have turned to how planning authorities can focus on the human side of delivering a good quality planning service.

Last month (August 2018), the Scottish Government published a report on customer service in the planning system. It examined different approaches to customer service across a range of private and public sector organisations in Scotland, with a view to identifying the lessons from these that could be applied to the planning system. Although focused on Scotland, the lessons are transferable elsewhere.

A number of challenges

The research found that while planning authorities in Scotland viewed high quality customer service as highly important, they faced a number of challenges to delivering this in practice.

Limited staff and financial resources are a key constraint affecting planning authorities’ ability to deliver high quality customer service. For example, customer expectations of the frequency and responsiveness of communication are often higher than what can reasonably be delivered.

There are also issues of inconsistency of service, both within and between local authorities in Scotland. This is due in part to different interpretations of specific legislation, as well as different levels of investment in, and commitment to, customer service within individual planning authorities.

The risk of individuals confounding ‘customer service’ and ‘outcomes’ – where the planning decision reached affects the individual’s perception of the quality of service they have received – is another key challenge when measuring the customer experience.

Current approaches

Each year, planning authorities in Scotland must prepare an annual Planning Performance Framework (PPF) report, which details their performance over the previous year.

At present, the PPF has no specific measure of customer service delivery. Instead, planning authorities must submit a ‘narrative commentary’ of their customer service performance, along with relevant case studies that demonstrate their actions.

This means that individual planning authorities decide how best to gather information about their own customer service performance. Some of the key methods used include:

Customer charters – which communicate customer service commitments to customers and employees

Customer satisfaction surveys – mainly online, however, some were still postal

Forums – the use of customer forums or focus groups to engage with customers

Complaint handling procedures – published details of organisational systems, protocols and SLAs for registering and responding to complaints

The report identified a number of ways in which customer service within the planning system could be improved.

First was the need to achieve a greater consistency of processes, enforcement and quality of service across Scotland. Clearer national guidance on implementing legislation would go some way to achieve this. Establishing a national survey of customer service in the planning system is also a priority. Lessons could be learned from the building standards system, which currently incorporates a Key Performance Outcome relating to improving the customer experience.

What is clear is that the move to e-planning is bringing a ‘culture change’. By speeding up the planning process and making more efficient use of resources, e-planning frees up both time and money to be spent elsewhere in the planning process. As one planning authority notes:

“It’s about how you work with the customer to bring them on the e-planning journey with you and change their mindset. In the long run the customer benefits because it speeds up the service.”

As technology and customer expectations evolve it will be important that e-planning solutions reflect this in the future.

Future directions

Good quality customer service helps to make the planning system easier to understand and processes more accessible and usable. This in turn opens up the system to those who might otherwise feel that it is too complex or time consuming to participate. This may be of particular importance when encouraging young people to become involved in consultations.

Improving customer service within the planning system is not something that is just ‘nice to have’. Planning has changed significantly over the years – and with change comes the need for reliable, cost-effective processes to drive end-to-end efficiency.

For 30 years, Idox has been supporting the work of local government planning departments. iApply, a planning application submission portal launched by the Idox Group in 2015, offers local authorities the opportunity to benefit from an out-of-the-box end-to-end digital solution that makes submitting planning, building and licence applications simple for customers and cost effective for the authority.

Finding money to fund community-led regeneration projects has always been difficult and as public budgets continue to be stretched, it can be hard to balance and prioritise the needs of different communities and groups. We’ve written on this blog before about how digital platforms are providing new ways to engage the public in government decision-making. So we were interested to hear that crowdfunding is also being explored for its potential to improve financing of regeneration.

Civic crowdfunding initiatives exist in Europe (for example, Voor je Buurt in the Netherlands, and Goteo in Spain) but they don’t explicitly involve public bodies as part of the crowd. But now the Mayor of London and Greater London Authority (GLA) is piloting an innovative way to plan and fund projects which puts local communities at the centre of the process. Working in partnership with the crowdfunding website Spacehive, the GLA is using a platform to enable local organisations to propose ideas for civic projects or new uses for unused space.

How it works

The Mayor pledges up to £20,000 to support the best proposals, with money coming from the High Street Fund. Public funds can make up no more than 75% of total project costs. Local organisations have to raise match funding from the wider community in order to unlock these public funds and make their projects a reality.

So far, the progress of the Crowdfunding Programme has been good. The first round received 81 proposals, 17 of which were supported, raising 118% match funding from the crowd. And in the second round, the GLA pledged £285,000 to 20 projects, leveraging over £450,000 of additional pledges – a 158% increase in funding. The third round of the programme is currently underway.

The programme was recognised as one of eleven leading examples of government innovation at the World Government Summit in 2016.

Putting local communities in the driving seat

A recent event held as part of the London Festival of Architecture looked at the early experiences of the programme and asked what the implications are for digital citizenship and community participation. Speakers from the GLA, Centre for London, Spacehive, Arup and one of the funded projects (Peckham Coal Line) debated whether it offers a practical solution to the need for a bottom-up, place-based approach to regeneration.

The event raised a lot of questions for anyone interested in strategic planning, public engagement and citizenship, reflecting the fact that this is a new approach.

Should publicly-driven campaigns be allowed to dictate urban change?

Is it simply rewarding communities who already have motivated and engaged residents, rather than areas which need capacity building?

Do organisations such as local authorities have the skills or political will to behave in the agile and nimble way that such platforms require?

To what extent is long-term sustainability or maintenance issues addressed if funding is used to kick-start community projects? Are projects an end in themselves or is the aim to help the public sector see the value in an initiative in order to adopt it and fund it themselves?

What is the potential for scalability or replicability in funding very local projects?

And finally, there is the fundamental question of what role should crowdfunded community projects be playing in the grand scheme of regeneration? Do they have to be making a serious contribution to improving outcomes or can they be fun and frivolous?

Early lessons

A key message was the importance of offline activity. A project is unlikely to succeed in generating match-funding if it’s unable to mobilise the local community and businesses behind the idea. The speakers also highlighted the importance of managing expectations. In some cases the projects being funded are just testing the feasibility of a concept. People making pledges need to realise this in order to prevent the cynicism that could result from perceived non-delivery.

From the point of view of creating engaged citizens, initiatives such as this can help the public understand the hard choices that need to be made, in a similar way to participatory budgeting exercises. The platform also has the potential to evolve, for example if there are buildings available for pop-up or temporary use, then a similar process could advertise and select projects to occupy them.

Civic crowdfunding as a route to creating and enabling change

Generally, local government processes are oriented around handling and dealing with complaints, rather than positive interactions and generating ideas and change. So it was refreshing to hear about a public body trying to turn this on its head.

And it seemed that – done well – civic crowdfunding is not a substitute for the role of local government in enabling regeneration. In fact, it increases the need for someone to be interpreting these local ideas into a wider, long-term vision for place.

The Hackable City is an ongoing research project which investigates how digital media technologies can be used to provide opportunities for more democratic city development. Based in the Netherlands, this project was founded by One Architecture and the Mobile City Foundation, and aims to empower citizens and bring them closer to the key stakeholders of ‘city making’, including government institutions and design professionals.

The rise of the platform society

Sharing platforms, such as Airbnb (which allows individuals to rent out their homes), and more personalised platforms, such as Trip Advisor (which allows individuals to review different ‘experiences’), have changed the way people consume, interact, and share knowledge. They have become the norm, disrupting the traditional idea of the city and presenting new challenges for urban development.

Why use the term ‘hackable’?

The Hackable City project argues that some of the principles associated with hacker subcultures could help us think about how we can use technology to create more open cities. Hacker subcultures often have a focus on opening up data and sharing knowledge, co-operation between experts and amateurs and the idea of ‘learning by doing’.

The project remarks that this is in contrast to the more technologically-driven or consumerist view of cities, often associated with smart cities.

Case studies

The Hackable City project identifies several initiatives that they believe are hackable. These include:

BSH5The BSH5 project involves an informal collective of self-builders, who have constructed properties in a brownfield redevelopment in the north of Amsterdam. The group coordinates their activities via a mailing list, a community website, and through traditional meetings. Apart from building their individual houses, they are also involved in improving the surrounding neighbourhood. The Municipality of Amsterdam provided these plots on a 50-year lease, and although the initial take up came mostly from architects and designers, recent years have seen more diverse self-builders. The Municipality has a very close relationship with the group – a key reason it was considered a hackable initiative. For example, when the contracts were initially set up, the municipality was open to suggestions on how the project might work (partly as it sought to understand more about how these projects might affect future urban development). However, the neighbourhood blog ‘I love Noord’, has criticised this close relationship and the group, suggesting that the project is an attempt to create a gated community under the guise of child-friendliness and better public spaces.

PeerbyPeerby is an online platform and mobile app that allows citizens to borrow items from people in their local area. The technology works by creating a common marketplace; however instead of providing a list of items, the user is given a set of questions, with the query emailed to the closest 100 users. So far, the project has been a success: with 80% of queries being responded to within 30 minutes. It provides people with an opportunity to borrow an item that isn’t often used, as well as to save money and reduce their levels of consumption, thus enhancing sustainability. This attempt to manage community resources differently is why Peerby is considered hackable.

Ring RingRing Ring is a pilot project that aims to encourage cycling by rewarding people for the number of kilometres cycled. The project was launched by Janine Hogendoorn, who, upon realising that cycling 30 minutes to work was not as hard as she first thought, decided to try and convince others. The project is currently lobbying the government to introduce tax exemptions for those who cycle to work. It also provides valuable data (such as where people cycle the most and when), which can be used to improve cycling infrastructure.

Verbeter de buurtVerbeter de buurt is an online platform and mobile phone app that allows local citizens to report problems and suggest ideas to their local municipality. The app provides a more convenient way for citizens to interact with government, and includes features such as the ability to track the progress of reports and to rate the handling of it. The majority of municipalities now accept these reports (320 out of 416), and 20 even use a customised package to streamline them. The main aim of the platform is not necessarily to manage complaints but to encourage citizens to share ideas with their municipalities. Verbeter de buurt is a hackable initiative because it transforms how citizens communicate with municipalities. It encourages citizens to care more about their local environment and to generate ideas to improve local areas. The team behind the project sees this platform as a way of reducing the bureaucracy associated with local government in the Netherlands (and in other countries).

Final thoughts

Hackable projects also exist outside of the Netherlands, such as the hackable cities toolkit, designed by the New School of Design Strategies at Parsons, in New York City. However, it will be interesting to see if these types of projects, which attempt to create a new dialogue between citizens and government, can become a more widespread and integral part of cities.

Follow us on Twitterto see what developments in public and social policy are interesting our research team. If you found this article interesting, you may also like to read:

The Town Meeting uses theatre as a way of co-producing research into public participation in planning with communities themselves. The Town Meeting has been performed in 12 communities across the north of England. The use of theatre in this way is unique and has engaged audiences in the issues in a way that traditional forms of research cannot. If you are interested to find out more about the project and the play, we have written a blog about it here and produced a ‘behind the scenes’ podcast about the development process here.

The impacts of the RTPI award

One of the major impacts of winning the award has been to develop the credibility of the project with both professionals and funders. The initial phase of the research was all about understanding the issues in more detail. We’ve now had a chance to do that and the second phase of the project has been to try to change planning practice to address some of the concerns raised by the participants in the project.

The new phase of the project aims to take the lessons learnt from the play and turn that into a tool which planners can use to co-produce knowledge which can inform strategic planning.

Bringing planning and health together

So far we have worked with health professionals and planners to explore how planning and health can be reunited. In the workshop, health professionals and planners were presented with a proposal to build a super-casino in a run-down seaside town. The play provided a forum for the planners and health professionals to discuss the wider implications of development proposals in a new way.

The event highlighted the lack of understanding that health professionals have of the planning system. It’s often felt that planning can be the solution to many problems but it has been clear from the project how little citizens and professionals alike understand the process of planning and its limitations.

Collaborative planning

We are now about to start working with Northumberland National Park Authority to assist in the development of their new local plan. Through a new version of the play it is hoped communities can understand the importance of the local plan in framing any later planning decision that may affect them.

Previous performances of the play and discussions with audiences have made it clear people only get involved in planning issues at the point when it’s often too late to have any meaningful impact on that decision. The paradox is that at the point at which they can make a meaningful difference, the preparation of the local plan, it is often difficult for communities to see the relevance to them.

Using a play as a tool in collaborative planning can therefore turn the abstract process of preparing a local plan into something meaningful by showing how it has a direct impact on later planning decisions which may affect them greatly. The play also allows the community the freedom to create a vision for their local area, in this case the National Park.

Gaining the trust of planners from the National Park was helped greatly by the award. There is a degree of risk on their part in taking on this untested, and some may say frivolous, method of plan production. The award has given the planners the confidence to take that risk.

We are hopeful that the next year will lead to some concrete outcomes for the project, and to the play making a meaningful difference to the way communities and planners co-produce knowledge about places that matter to them.

Final thoughts

At a recent performance of the play in Cockermouth, the ‘Blennerhasset Village Parliament’ was mentioned. I had not heard of this and asking around the department, neither had any of my colleagues. Started in 1866 as a way involving the whole population in the governance of the community, the village parliament was an example of community governance in the 19th Century.

It was a reminder that sometimes we think we are being innovative when in fact we are merely repeating history – and of the fundamental value of engaging people in the process of research.

Dr Paul Cowie is a Research Assistant in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at the University of Newcastle. Paul’s research focuses on community planning and community representation in the planning process. In 2015, Paul and his project The Town Meeting won the Sir Peter Hall Award for Wider Engagement at the RTPI Awards for Research Excellence.

“The most important factor in improving participation is persuading voters that the election (and the political process more generally) is relevant to them and that their vote matters. That is the responsibility of politicians – of all parties, and at all levels of governance – and, arguably, the media.” The Electoral Commission

Disengagement with mainstream politics, particularly among young people, is a common concern among politicians. But in an age of all things digital, and with the growth of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, there are undoubtedly more ways than ever to engage people with politics.

It seems that traditional election campaigns of door-to-door canvassing, local meetings and incessant letter box mailings are being surpassed by a new age of digital campaigning, with hashtags, retweets and ‘likes’ all a familiar occurrence.

But with a little over two weeks until voters across the UK go to the polls, has the electorate become more engaged?

Lack of engagement

Low voter turnout has been an increasing concern in the UK. Last year’s general election saw a 66.1% turnout – the largest in 18 years. However, this was still significantly lower than the highest ever turnout at a general election in 1950, which reached 83.9%.

It has been even worse for local and European elections, and during the first Police and Crime Commissioners election in 2012, turnout was just 15% – the lowest recorded level of participation in a peacetime non-local government election in the UK.

A general mistrust of politicians and the centralised model of governance in the UK is also apparent. And this is particularly the case among young people. Findings from the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study showed that 80% of young adults reported very low levels of trust in politicians in the run up to the 2015 general election.

Despite this, a majority of young adults said they were either ‘very likely’ or ‘fairly likely’ to vote in the election and many were engaging in some kind of political activity – nearly 90% were members of a social networking site, and over half this group used social media to engage with political or civic material.

According to a recent report that examined the relationship between the media and the electorate in the 2015 general election, “engagement with young voters worked best where media brands met them on their own ‘turf’ – online, on social media, and particularly on Facebook”.

Role of social media

Social media platforms certainly offer new ways to encourage citizen engagement and provide a level of transparency otherwise unseen in political discourse.

A recent report from the Design Commission argues that social media networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, can dramatically reduce the perceived ‘barrier’ between the electorate and political decision-makers.

It points to the unprecedented voter turnout witnessed during the Scottish referendum (84% – last seen in the UK in the 1950’s) and notes that whilst it was a generation-defining decision, “it can be argued that effective social media usage engaged the populace in conversation and debate and encouraged democratic participation, especially in younger age groups”. The referendum generated 10 million interactions and there were more than 4 million tweets on the topic between August 1st and September 8th.

Similarly, a study of 16-19 year-olds who voted for the first time in the Scottish referendum highlighted that social media were generally useful tools for political communication and engagement, particularly amongst the younger generations. Reasons cited, included:

their ubiquity

their ease of use and accessibility

that they can give rise to a feeling of community and shared values

that they serve as an alternative information source to the ‘biased’ press and media.

An Ipsos Mori poll also found that a majority of Britons believe social media gives people a voice who would not normally take part in political debate and is breaking down the barriers between the electorate and politicians. And, again, it highlighted that social media has the potential to have an even greater impact on 18-24 year olds, a third of whom think social media will influence their vote.

Help or hindrance?

While many believe social media is a tool of empowerment and transparency, others argue that it does not help the political process by improving people’s understanding of political parties, or the issues, but rather leads to a ‘a trivialization of the electoral process’.

Ipsos Mori’s study found that people also recognised the disadvantages of social media, with most believing it is making debate more divisive and superficial.

It could be argued that inflammatory comments made on social media could stir up hostility and lead to aggravated debates, thereby detracting from serious political debate. Or that the use of slang can lead to confusion and ambiguity, potentially contributing to a lack of meaningful discussion.

There is also the issue of space constraints with some social media, such as the 140 character limit for Twitter, which can make it even more difficult for arguments to be conveyed in the way intended. And the accuracy of information provided should also be considered.

Final thoughts

Nevertheless, it is clear that social media does play a role in engaging people who may otherwise not participate in political debate.

However, what isn’t clear, as concluded by the report on the 2015 general election, is that “despite the millions of tweets, retweets, posts, likes, shares, and views, there is no evidence that social media played a decisive role either in boosting engagement and turnout, or in the election result.”

That is not to say that social media won’t play this role in future elections, if its growth continues and if those of the digital generation move into key political and media roles – #GE2020?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may also be interested in our previous blogs:

The first mention of ‘crowdsourcing’ was in 2006 by Jeff Howe, in an article in Wired magazine. His article highlighted the basic premise that technology has enabled us to ‘source’ ideas, labour, and opinions from a potentially large group of people.

Initially used in business, the idea of crowdsourcing has now been applied in government and in a policy context. And although involving people in government is not a new idea, innovative technologies have reduced costs and increased the reach of traditional participation methods, such as town hall meetings. Vili Lehdonvirta and Jonathan Bright, academics at the Oxford Internet Institute, suggest that the unique ability to source a large pool of opinions or ideas has a quality of its own.

With the growing demand for greater transparency and democratic participation, and an increasingly tech savvy population, it’s likely that crowdsourcing will become more prevalent in public decision-making. For that reason, I’ve decided to highlight some of the most interesting examples of government crowdsourcing platforms.

Our MK

Our MK is an online citizen engagement platform, which is part of MK: Smart – a collaborative initiative to turn Milton Keynes into a “Smart City”. The Open University, a major partner in the initiative, explains that smart cities participate in “ICT-led urban innovation that addresses sustainability issues”. The Our MK project enables the local community to put forward their ideas, start their own sustainability projects, and volunteer for projects that already exist, such as the Food Waste Juice Bar or the Breastfeeding Hub App. Overall, the scheme has been a success, with thousands of citizens innovating, collaborating, and building projects.

Better Reykjavik

Better Reykjavik is an online platform that has been developed to provide a direct link for citizens to Reykjavik City Council. It enables citizens to voice, debate and prioritise the issues that they believe will improve their city. For example, school children have suggested the need for more field trips.

In 2010, the platform played an important role in Reykjavik’s city council elections; providing a space for all political parties to crowdsource ideas for their campaign. After the election, Jón Gnarr, former Mayor of Reykjavik, encouraged citizens to use the platform during coalition talks. Within a four week period (before and after the election), 40% of Reykjavik’s voters had used the platform and almost 2000 priorities had been created.

Since its introduction, almost 60% of citizens have used the platform, and the city has spent 1.9 million euros on developing projects sourced from citizens.

Citizens’ Initiative Act

In 2012, the Finnish government introduced the Citizens’ Initiative Act, with the purpose of increasing participation of the under 40’s – a demographic where less than half chose to vote in elections. It enshrines into Finnish law a mechanism for allowing citizens to have their say in the legislation debated in parliament. However, before an initiative can progress, a minimum of 50,000 statements of support need to be gathered from voting age Finnish citizens.

From a technical perspective, citizens have been crowdsourced using open source software designed by the Open Ministry, a non-profit organization based in Helsinki, Finland.

The initiative has been used to gather views on a number of issues, including the first equal marriage law in 2014 (where citizens were involved in collecting signatures as well as drafting legislation), and in 2013 the off-road traffic law reform (which focuses on where and how fast snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles can be ridden).

Future Melbourne

Future Melbourne is an interesting project by the City of Melbourne Council, which asks its citizens to help write the city plan. The wiki (a website which allows collaboration), which was launched in 2008, encourages citizens to share ideas and to edit the content of the Future Melbourne draft plan. Tietoja Minusta, a Finnish academic, suggests that this was possibly the first online community consultation that focused on large-scale city planning.

The project has now moved into a new phase with the latest iteration, Future Melbourne 2026. Some of the key issues up for discussion include facilities for the homeless, the use of arts to promote equity and inclusion, and smarter public transport.

Simplicity

In 2011, New York City launched ‘Simplicity’, an internal crowdsourcing project to harness the knowledge and experience of its employees to improve efficiency. The city used a social networking platform provided by Spigit – a tech company specialising in these types of tools. During the test phase of the project, a number of suggestions were made, including a web-based portal for items made redundant by other agencies, and a web-based help desk for employees looking to contact other employees with a particular expertise.

Final thoughts

These are just some of the many crowdsourcing initiatives introduced by governments, and although there has been some debate about their effectiveness, it’s clear that they tap into wider popular trends, such as the sharing economy. Whether it’s citizens having their say in city planning or having their questions read out in Prime Minister’s Questions, it’s likely that crowdsourcing will continue to play a role in government.

Follow us on Twitter to see what developments in policy and practice are interesting our research team.

Further reading: if you liked this blog post, you might also want to read our other articles on digital issues.

The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Bill was finally passed by the Scottish Parliament after a debate and vote late on Wednesday evening. In this article we look at the background to the Bill, the reforms that it proposes and its potential to strengthen community planning.

Background

The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Bill was introduced in the Scottish Parliament on 11th June 2014, and the Stage 2 debate took place in March 2015. The Bill has its origins in the 2011 Scottish National Party election manifesto (where it was referred to as the Community Empowerment and Renewal Bill). This was followed by two Scottish Government consultations. The Bill is part of a broader programme for public service reform in Scotland which was introduced by the Commission on the Future Delivery of Public Services, which stressed the need to ensure that public services are built around people and communities.

The Bill sets out reforms in areas including community planning, community right to buy land, involving communities in the delivery of public services and the acquisition of public assets by communities.

Community planning provisions

The Bill gives community planning partnerships (CPPs) a statutory basis and extends the range of public bodies which are defined as community planning partners beyond those set out in the 2003 Local Government in Scotland Act, which introduced community planning. It sets out a legal obligation for local authorities and their partners to participate with each other and to participate with any community bodies which the partnership considers likely to be able to contribute to community planning.

There is a particular focus on involving organisations which represent disadvantaged groups, and CPPs are required to “act with a view to reducing inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage unless the partnership considers that it would be inappropriate to do so.”

CPPs are also required to prepare and publish a local outcomes improvement plan and to review whether they are making progress in achieving these outcomes. They must also publish progress reports for each reporting year.

Will the reforms strengthen community planning?

A number of reports have been critical of community planning since its inception, in particular with respect to its involvement of, and impact on, local communities. The Christie Commission highlighted “variations in the effectiveness of community planning partnerships,” while an Audit Scotland report found that barriers such as the lack of a clear accountability framework have prevented CPPs from operating as intended. It argued that all community planning partners need to work together to address these barriers.

A SPICe briefing on the Bill noted that “putting community planning on a statutory basis, and requiring participation from all partners, not just local authorities, has long been considered a way in which community planning could be improved.” The general duty on all partners to participate, and specific responsibilities conferred on some partners to ensure the efficient and effective operation of the partnerships, may help to address some of the previous shortcomings of CPPs.

However, the Local Government and Regeneration Committee does not consider that a statutory duty is sufficient to ensure the effective participation of all public bodies in community planning. Some stakeholders have also highlighted issues with how outcomes will be selected and prioritised by CPPs, while others have voiced concerns that the process will remain top down, and will not give communities much of an opportunity to contribute to determining outcomes.

While the proposed reforms place clear responsibilities on CPPs to involve relevant bodies in community planning, and contain provisions which aim to address previous problems with CPPs, we will need to see how they are applied in practice in order to determine whether they will bring about improvements in community planning, and ultimately lead to improved outcomes for communities.

Following the May 2015 General Election, the only Conservative minister to be replaced in the resulting cabinet reshuffle was Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. The appointment in his place of Greg Clark, dubbed “the architect of localism” and the person who “invented neighbourhood planning”, reinforces the government’s commitment to the neighbourhood planning system. Just a few weeks later the Queen’s speech confirmed that there would be legislation with provisions “to simplify and speed up the neighbourhood planning system, to support communities that seek to meet local housing and other development needs through neighbourhood planning”.

The Localism Act 2011

The neighbourhood planning system was introduced by the Localism Act in 2011. At that time Greg Clark was the minster responsible for the legislation’s passage through Parliament. He described it then as “as a powerful option [for communities] to come together and decide, collectively, what their neighbourhood should look like in future; where new shops and offices should go; and which green spaces are most important to the community.” (Clark, 2011)

The Act gives residents and businesses in a neighbourhood the option to do two things: create a neighbourhood development plan for their area; propose that a particular development or sort of development should automatically get planning permission in their area (neighbourhood development order/community right to build order). Neighbourhood plans must be subject to a public consultation period, expert examination and a local referendum. But once passed at referendum, local planning authorities are required to adopt the plan and give it weight, along with the local plan and national planning policy, in determining planning applications.

Progress so far

Earlier this year the government celebrated the milestone of fifty neighbourhood development plans passing the referendum stage. However, the fifty or so plans already approved are just the tip of the iceberg. In total around 1,400 communities are now involved at one stage or another in the formal neighbourhood planning process. 6.1 million people in England live in a designated ‘neighbourhood area’ (i.e. one formally designated as an area to be covered by a neighbourhood plan) – representing around 11% of the population. But, of course, that still means that 89% of the population is not yet involved.

Going forward

Whether this level of activity can be regarded as satisfactory progress and evidence of a real public appetite for neighbourhood planning depends on your point of view. But either way, the neighbourhood planning process represents a new mechanism for involving and empowering more people in the difficult decisions that the planning system has always faced – which can surely only be a good thing for those who become involved. And with the new government reiterating its importance, and a new minister in place who sees it as fundamental to localism, neighbourhood planning is here to stay.

The challenge, and legal requirement, for planners is to provide support to neighbourhoods to become involved.

References

Clark, Greg. A licence to innovate, IN MJ magazine, 17 Nov 2011, p15

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Sometimes it feels like every city in the world is now claiming to be ‘smart’. Our research team regularly add new reports on the topic to our database. And with a policy agenda riding on the back of a multi-billion pound global industry, the positivist rhetoric around smart cities can seem overwhelming.

We’ve blogged before about the disconnect between what surveys suggest the public values in terms of quality of life in urban areas, and what smart cities are investing in. And last week I attended a conference in Glasgow ‘Designing smart cities: opportunities and regulatory challenges’ which refreshingly brought together a multi-disciplinary audience to look at smart cities in a more critical light.

The conference was rich and wide-ranging – too broad for me to try and summarise the discussions. Instead here are some reflections on the challenges which need to be explored.

Every smart city is a surveillance city

Look in any smart city prospectus or funding announcement and you’ll find mention of how data will be ‘managed’, ‘captured’, ‘monitored’, ‘shared’, ‘analysed’, ‘aggregated’, ‘interrogated’ etc. And this is inevitably presented as a benign activity happening for the common good, improving efficiency, saving money and making life better.

As David Murakami Wood pointed out at the conference however, this means that every smart city is by necessity a surveillance city – even if policymakers and stakeholders are reluctant to admit this.

Public debate is failing to keep up with the pace of change

Even for someone who takes a keen interest in urbanism and the built environment, any description of smart cities can risk leaving you feeling like a techno-illiterate dinosaur. It’s clear that there is also a huge amount of hype around the construction (or retrofitting) of smart cities – with vested interests keen to promote a positive message.

Do we really understand the possibilities being opened up when we embed technology in our urban infrastructure? And more importantly, what are the ethical questions raised around sharing and exploiting data? The pace of the development and rollout of new technologies within our urban environments seems to be running ahead of the desirable cycle of reflection and critique.

An interesting point was also made about language – and whether experts, technologists and policymakers need to adjust their use of language and jargon, in order for discussion about smart cities to be inclusive. Ubicomp … augmented reality … the Internet of Things … even the Cloud – how can the public give informed consent to participating in the smart city if the language used obscures and obfuscates what is happening with their data?

Where can we have a voice in the data city?

Following on from this point, cities are not ends in themselves – to be successful they must serve the interests and needs of the people who live, work and visit them. An interesting strand of the conference discussion considered what a bottom-up approach to smart cities would look like.

Alison Powell highlighted that there’s been a shift from seeing people as citizens to treating them as ‘citizen consumers’ – I’d add that within the built environment, this goes hand-in-hand with the commercialisation and privatisation of public space – and this has profound implications around questions of inclusion/exclusion. And also where power and decision-making sits – and who is profiting.

Although some general examples of community participation projects were mentioned during the conference, these didn’t seem to address the question of how ‘people’ can engage with smart cities. Not as problems to be managed or controlled – or as passive suppliers of data to sensors – but as creative and active participants.

Conclusion

I left the conference wondering where society is heading and how we, the Knowledge Exchange, can support our members in local government and the third sector to understand the extensive opportunities and implications of smart cities. We see a key part of our mission to be horizon scanning – and our briefings for members focus on drawing together analysis, emerging evidence and case studies.

Not all towns or cities have the resources, investment or desire to lead the way in technological innovation. But the challenge of bridging the gap between professionals and their vision and understanding of smart cities, and people in communities, is a universal one.

As William Gibson observed: “The future is already here … it’s just not very evenly distributed”.

The Idox Information Service can give you access to a wealth of further information on smart cities or public participation. To find out more on how to become a member, contact us.

Our reading list prepared for last autumn’s Annual UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference looks at some recent literature on smart cities.

The Idox Group is the leading applications provider to UK local government for core functions relating to land, people and property, such as its market leading planning systems. Over 90% of UK local authorities are now customers. Idox provides public sector organisations with tools to manage information and knowledge, documents, content, business processes and workflow as well as connecting directly with the citizen via the web.